Pacific Skies: American Flyers in World War II

INTRODUCTION: A World Away from War

3 INTRODUCTION A W O R L D AWAY F R O M WA R What American air power would accomplish in the Pacific during World War II was, in the late s, almost completely unimaginable. That the German Luftwaffe and British Royal Air Force would soon be fighting it out in the skies over Europe was no useful measure: that conflict, begun with dogfights and sustained with high-level bombing, used tactics and strategies that would prove worse than useless for conducting an air war in the Pacific. Nor were the achievements of Japanese airmen in China and Southeast Asia a good picture of what was to come. What worked for Japanese flyers in these early stages only led to failures once America was engaged. Not that the American military was interested in getting any previews; when a former Army Air Corps captain named Claire Chennault hired trained American pilots to forfeit their commissions and fly for China, the briefings on Japanese aircraft and methods he volunteered to Washington , D.C., were ignored. Yet the issue is not how the United States was caught off guard or unprepared. The war did start with a surprise attack by a greatly underestimated enemy, but even with the smoke ✪ ✪ ✪ cleared and bodies buried the progress of a three-and-one-half year air war against Japan could not be predicted—other than that somehow, some way, it had to happen. Dogfights? Not with the Japanese Zero, if American flyers were to survive. High-level bombing? That was fruitless against an enemy’s navy, difficult against shore installations on scores of islands reaching halfway across the ocean, and ineffective against the Japanese mainland even once it could be reached—until, after lower-level firebombing crippled his cities, the enemy could be dealt two decisive blows from the air that ended the war in a manner almost incomprehensible at the time, let alone half a decade before. Memoirs of an air war are always interesting, but especially so for the Pacific theater of operations in World War II. Out here, everyone was undergoing a radical learning experience, and an especially challenging one at that, because no established body of knowledge was available to be acquired; almost from step one, everything had to be figured out from scratch. How does one fight a strong naval power when most of one’s battleships have been blasted out of action in the war’s first hour? How does one take an air capability designed to defend the shores of the American continent and direct it to a scattering of targets half a world away? And when the air war is finally brought to the enemy, how does an American fighter pilot, in instinct as well as by training disposed to face his enemy directly and stay with him until victory is secured, adapt to the strange necessity of hit-and-run tactics? How does a bomber pilot, trained for strategies at twenty thousand feet above the earth, come down to the deck to skip bomb, strafe, or light afire his suddenly personal targets? And how, having been raised in a country so dedicated to humane values, could one go back to high altitude not I N T R O D U C T I O N : A W O R L D AWAY F R O M WA R 4 just one but two times and drop a fearsome weapon of almost total mass destruction? In the war to come, Robert A. Winston would fly fighter planes off the carriers Lexington and Enterprise and eventually lead Navy Fighting Squadron  into the Marianas Turkey Shoot in June  from the light carrier Cabot. By , when he wrote Fighting Squadron, he could answer all of the above questions and more, for ways had been devised to fight and win this new style of war. But a decade earlier, when all he wanted to do was learn how to fly, the nature of this coming conflict was far from his mind. Fortunately, he wrote a book about that stage of his awareness as well: Dive Bomber, published in . His reason for joining the Navy and working for commission as an aviator echoes sentiments of many who would fly in World War II: “Eighteen dollars an hour,” he exclaims when learning what private lessons would cost. “I had expected flying lessons...